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Join Evan Smith and KLRU’s Texas Monthly Talks for an interview with legal journalist Jeffrey Toobin. Doors open at 1:30 p.m. and the taping starts at 2:15 p.m. on Wednesday, May 27. Smith will interview Toobin for about 30 minutes to be followed by an audience q&a. RSVP for this taping here

It is, more than anything else, his extraordinary range that impresses. Here’s a guy who can spend months, years, producing a 900-page biography of Teddy Roosevelt and at the same time, just as the first excerpts from that serious yet readable tome are seeing print, publish a 12,000-word cover story in Rolling Stone about Bob Dylan — who can edit both Ronald Reagan’s diaries and Hunter S. Thompson’s letters, who can serve as the official biographer for both Rosa Parks and Jack Kerouac, who can write passionately and authoritatively about Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath and Lance Armstrong’s comeback and Vietnam and Henry Ford and the Mississippi River and Norman Mailer and so much more. more →

Austin writer Bud Shrake passed away early today. Shrake taped an episode of Texas Monthly Talks in January 2008 during which time host Evan Smith said “If the assemblage of undeniably talented outlaws, renegades, malcontents, and misfits who emerged from the iron triangle of Paschal High School, Texas Christian University, and the Metroplex newspaper business amounts to a Fort Worth mafia, this week’s guest is surely the don: the most talented outlaw, renegade, malcontent, and misfit of the bunch — the one with the longest life in the world of writing at various levels and in various media, and the one whose work, more than that of any other, continues to surprise and delight.” Read more of Smith’s comments on Shrake here or watch the complete interview:

She’s a member of an exceedingly exclusive club — only 30 other people have held the high-profile, high-pressure job that she did for just under two years, from January 20, 1993, to December 22, 1994, and she was a pioneer: the first woman ever, and the second-youngest person ever, to serve as White House Press Secretary. more →

It’s probably too easy to say, and certainly too corny to observe, that Abraham Verghese’s writing is just what the doctor ordered, or that his compelling narratives, both fiction and non, are the cure for what ails the common reader — but there’s no denying that the 54-year-old physician and author is a leading literary light these days, someone whose magazine work, for the likes of The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, and, yes, TEXAS MONTHLY, is celebrated and much-anticipated, and whose three books, most recently the novel Cutting for Stone, are widely read and admired. But it’s as much his personal story as his professional resume that has given lift to his career. more →

KLRU will be taping an episode of Texas Monthly Talks featuring Dee Dee Myers on Friday, April 3. Doors open at 9:30 a.m. and the taping starts at 10 a.m.

Myers served as White House Press Secretary during President Bill Clinton’s first term, becoming the first woman to hold that position. She left the White House at the end of 1994. Myers is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and the author of the bestselling book Why Women Should Rule the World.

When Bryan Burrough set out four years ago to write a book about the legendary Texas oil dynasties, he couldn’t possbly have known how the oil business would come to dominate the national conversation for the bulk of his reporting window and, most important, at the precise moment his great tome would see print. This has been quite a time for petroleum producers and consumers, with the price per barrel shooting up to a record high and then, just as preciptously, plummeting to a depressing low. The cost of a gallon of gas likewise rose and fell, amid all the confessions of our addiction to sources of energy purchased from and controlled by friends and enemies overseas. more →

KLRU’s Texas Monthly Talks will tape two episodes on Thursday, March 12.

Mary Ellen Mark
Thursday, March 12; Doors open at 11:30 a.m. Taping starts at noon.
For more than forty years, Mark has traveled extensively, documenting cultures from around the world and across the United States. Mark is in town to launch the Icons of Photography Lecture series, sponsored by the new Austin Center for Photography. More details on the Mary Ellen Mark taping and RSVP here

Billy Bob Thornton
Doors open at 2:30 p.m. Taping starts at 3 p.m.
The Arkansas-born Thornton worked an eclectic mix of jobs as a painter, sawmill worker, grocery store clerk and member of a ZZ Top tribute band before moving to Los Angeles in 1984 to make a career as an actor. More details on the Billy Bob Thornton taping and RSVP here

If you are unlucky enough to be in need of the services provided by the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, then you know all you need to know about this extraordinary facility. At what may be the most frightening, most emotionally wrenching moment of your life — when you or a loved one is diagnosed with a disease that may well be fatal, one that kills, it is estimated, 1,500 people each day — one of the nation’s two premier institutions with expertise in the causes, treatment, and prevention of every conceivable form of cancer is able and eager to assist you. more →